Modern Notions Of Design: The Furniture of Gaetano Pesce

By SUZANNE SLESIN

Published: November 10, 1988

FOR Gaetano Pesce, to be modern is to face the world squarely and use design as a means to comment on it. For nearly 20 years, the Italian architect and furniture designer has taken advantage of modern technology to create remarkable pieces designed specifically for mass production. The only problem: since just a few have been mass produced, most people are unfamiliar with his work.

That is sure to change. Two major exhibitions of his work open today in Manhattan, one at the Steelcase Design Partnership and the other at the Max Protetch gallery.

In 1972, Mr. Pesce (pronounced PESH-ay) was well-represented in a watershed exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art called ''Italy: The New Domestic Landscape.'' Included were his designs for an inflatable armchair, a giant metal architect's drafting lamp and a voluptuous polyurethane chair and ottoman covered in stretch fabric.

More than a decade and a half later, Mr. Pesce, 49 years old, is still inventing new shapes and experimenting with materials, creating innovative designs with the same high-tech wit and high style.

''In 1970 he already represented to me the notion of the artist as architect/designer, and that is a great tradition that he has brilliantly maintained,'' said Emilio Ambasz, an architect and the former curator of design at MOMA who organized the 1972 exhibition there. ''I personally adore his work, but I know it's an acquired taste.''

The current shows not only offer people an opportunity to judge for themselves but also serve as a platform for Mr. Pesce's iconoclastic views. ''Why is everybody in the United States trying just to make money?'' he asked. ''I respect it, I need it, but there are people in other countries who have another kind of curiosity, who like to explore different things because that is part of being creative.''

''The most extraordinary progress we are making is to understand that culture is not what we originally thought - like music, painting, poetry, sculpture,'' he continued. ''Today culture must include architecture, fashion, even business. In the factory, they are making culture today. Design as a cultural element is not architecture's little brother but one of its major protagonists.''

Mr. Pesce's outlook is broad and humanistic. A world traveler, he currently spends three weeks a month in New York.

Both shows are autobiographical. The flat faces at Max Protetch, which began as experiments to test urethane's elasticity, became prototypes of the designer's quirkily brilliant merging of the personal and emotional with the industrial and the inanimate.

When working on furniture designs, he takes a pragmatic approach. For his ''I Feltri'' chairs, introduced in Milan in 1987, Mr. Pesce experimented with felt, injecting the ordinary material with liquid resin until it became rigid. The idea was to develop a chair that would be easy to manufacture, even in a country with limited industrial capabilities.

Designs that use modern industrial technology yet still recall traditional objects are Pesce trademarks. One of his most recent designs, ''Chair With Still Life,'' shows the bond he has created between traditional art and design. The chair is made of four different densities of urethane so that the legs are strong but the back is flexible.

A small group of apples and oranges in the same material, a reminder of the classic still life, sits demurely on one corner of the seat, a decorative footnote that does not prevent the chair from being used. The prototype is $5,000 at Max Protetch.

One of his fundamental canons is that repetition and homogeneity are to be avoided.

''A long time ago, I started something called 'diversified series production,' '' Mr. Pesce said, referring to his mass-produced chairs and tables that retain a one-of-a-kind look. ''Part of this is giving the object the handmade look when it is not. People want to own something that is unique.''

He celebrates the individual approach, both on the production line where factory workers can vary the resin material in a series of tables so that each one is different, or in the shop, where consumers find that each purchase is different. ''In the future we will not want one object done a million times, but a lot of different things produced in small series,'' Mr. Pesce said.

In the Steelcase Design Partnership show, rather than commenting on the world at large, Mr. Pesce took a frank approach. ''The show is a portrait of myself as seen through the object,'' he said. ''We're showing all my designs made by Cassina since 1975 but that were never introduced in the United States.''

Cassina, an Italian manufacturer of contemporary furniture, is represented in the United States by Atelier International, owned by Steelcase.

Mr. Pesce's 1987 ''People'' fabric, a colorful pattern of 570 different figures, also plays with the idea of design reflecting contemporary society.

The pattern was inspired by a textile, made at the time of the Russian Revolution, in which all the figures look alike. ''But my people are young, old, fat, not-fat, female, male, do different work, whatever we have in a segment of society,'' Mr. Pesce said. ''The idea was to say something different after 60 years.'' (The fabric has a list price of $150 a yard from Atelier International.) The architect's 1984 ''Cannaregio,'' a curvaceous sofa, is made up of an array of 16 different modules (the list price is from $850 to $8,500 through Atelier International). ''Different seats for different people,'' Mr. Pesce said.